COGENT to make teaching and learning a lot easier

The researchers at the UA developed a programme, which they called as COGENT. The programme has five modules and each has been designed to activate different aspects of cognition, language and literacy, understanding relationships between words, sentences and stories and manipulating sounds and letters.

Kim Patriquin, a grade three teacher, says she faces a struggle each day in her Hobbema classroom, as many of her students don’t spend much time on schoolwork at home. She says her students lack the reading, memory and organizational skills they should have by grade three.

Patriquin says there are programs similar to COGENT, but they’re out-dated and mainly focus on reading, thus adding that COGENT can be used for much more including memory, sequencing and math.

The researchers conducted a study in Patriquin’s classroom, and chose the First Nations children because they were often diagnosed with reading problems at a higher rate than the national average.

The students in Patriquin's class were all diagnosed as very poor readers. COGENT was taught for 35 minutes a day, three times a week, for one year. At the end of the program 73 percent of the students improved their reading and were no longer classified as very poor readers.